Information on working terriers, dogs, natural history, hunting, and the environment, with occasional political commentary as I see fit. This web log is associated with the Terrierman.com web site.

Sunday, October 04, 2015

Let's Do to Horses What We Did to Shepherds

One of my friends in the U.K. has bird-dogged me to a Belgium blog at which the German Shepherd dog has been morphed from what it once looked like to what it looks like now in the show ring.

See below.

The blog's clever author then went on to morph a horse to show what that animal would look like if we did to horses what we have done to German Shepherds.

See below.

Anyone want to be a Jockey on this one?

By why stop there?

What would a horse look like if we morphed it to show what has been done to the Bulldog -- an achondroplastic (dwarf) breed with a severely brachycephalic (flat) face?

Anyone want to take a stab at that little exercise? The morphing software is free at this link -- it just needs someone good at photoshop to create the end point picture for horse and dog (pit bull) to which the program morphs to.

Have at it and send me the results, and I will post them here, and send them off to Belgium and the U.K. as well (a little thank you for good work to the folks on the other side of the Pond).

12 comments:

My one quibble with both animations is that it underestimates the dropping of the pasterns driven by overangulation in the rear.

I see show GSDs with pasterns that are practically horizontal. I've seen show GSDs "walking" on their pasterns and hocks both. It looks so painful -- 60% of the dog's weight is on those limp wrists. Or more, as the males tend to be overbuilt in the front.

When I find my little external hard drive, I can post a photo of such a creature that will make you weep.

I don' wanna see a brachycephalic horse. Have enough fodder for nightmares from Montana.

And there are brachycephalic horses among the dwarf culls in miniatures. It doesn't seem to affect the minis the way that it does in small dog breeds. A horse's nasal passages are a huge section of its skull, not to mention the space needed for their huge crown reserve, so there may be a limit to how small thier faces can get and live.

The gated horses are about where the 1950s shepherd was -- a question of degrees. But they are clearly moving in the same direction, you are right as rain! And no, I don't think I have ever seen one.

I would like to see a brachycelphalic dwarf horse. Are they born retarded? And how brachycelphalic are they really? A dog has HUGE nasal caviites too, but once the nose is pushed into the eyeballs as it with pekingese and bulldogs, there is not much to work with. We are talking about a horse with a nose that stops at the eyeball.

The exaggeration of features in horse breeding bugs me to no end. I think there is something in the human perception in general that begins to not see what is in front of them. Arabian horses used to have lovely dished faces, but now it's so exaggerated it's called a "chibbah" and looks like a lump between the eyes. The chibbah is referred to as a "royal" feature. Oh, please. Quarter Horses are ridiculously over-muscled, over-fed like veal calves, and stand on tiny feet, often resulting in permanent lameness before they are of riding age. Don't get me started about the absurdity and cruelty that is the gaited horse world. They all need a jumbo-sized can of whoop-ass opened up on them. When I was a kid a big horse was 16 hands, but now if it's under 17 hands it's considered under-sized. I just got rid of a very nice 17 hand horse two months ago, and I swear I'll never have another that big. I swore it before, and forgot. Dummy. Look at women...remember when a C-cup was considered "busty"? And a D-cup was pornographic? Collagen lips have go SO weird that the upper lip is routinely bigger than the bottom lip. WTFWTFWTF???? Dogs can't breath for smashed-in faces, horses are lame almost out of the box, women are maimed in the name of "beauty"? Humans lack the ability to recognize "enough", admire and back away slowly.

Which one of you guys is gentleman enough to hold my hair while I puke?

The googles is not always our friend.

But remember, these suffering little cripples are "nothing to be ashamed of." They are horsie angels. One need not feel guilty for causing their suffering by bringing them into the world in the quest for ever-cuter tiny non-functional horses.